rs. They charge
immense prices, and just for the moment the blessed Village--always
passionately hospitable to new cults and theories and visions--is
receiving them cordially, with arms and purses that are both wide
open.

None of us can afford to depreciate the genius nor the judgment of
Freud, but I defy any Freud-alienist to efficiently psychoanalyse the
Village! By the time he were half done with the job he would be a
Villager himself and then--pouf! That for his psychoanalysis!

Have you ever read that most enchanting book of Celtic mysticism,
inconsequent whimsey and profound symbolism--"The Crock of Gold"--by
one James Stevens? The author is not a Villager, and his message is
one which has its root and spring in the signs and wonders of another,
an older and a more intimately wise land than ours. But when I read of
those pure, half-pagan immortals in the dance of the _Sluaige Shee_
(the Fairy Hosts) I could not help thinking that Greenwich Village
might well adopt certain passages as fitting texts and interpretations
of themselves and their own lives--"The lovers of gaiety and peace,
long defrauded."

The Shee, as they dance, sing to the old grey world-dwellers,--or
Stevens says they do, and I for one believe he knows all there is to
know about it ('tis a Leprechaun he has for a friend):

"Come to us, ye who do not know where ye are--ye who live
among strangers in the houses of dismay and
self-righteousness. Poor, awkward ones! How bewildered and
be-devilled ye go!... In what prisons are ye flung? To what
lowliness are ye bowed? How are ye ground between the laws
and the customs? Come away! For the dance has begun lightly,
the wind is sounding over the hill...."

CHAPTER IX

_And Then More Villagers_

... A meeting place for the few who are struggling ever and
ever for an art that will be truly American. An art that is
not hidebound by the deadening influences of a decadent
Europe, or the result of intellectual theories evolved by
those whose only pleasure in existence is to create laws for
others to obey ... an art, let us say, that springs out of
the emotional depths of creative spirit, courageous and
unafraid of rotting power, or limited scope ... an art whose
purpose is flaming beauty of creation and nothing
else.--HAROLD HERSEY, in _The Quill_ (Greenwich
Village).

Someone said today to the author o